FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Haven't heard it in decades. Built to last, this stuff.

• AlterNet describes this six-minute disinfomercial as "Insane Video Presented by Kim Davis' Law Group at Extremist Christian Campus." We hear that kind of language all the time, but this thing is literally insane, in an instructive way. "Kim Davis' Law Group" is Liberty Counsel, experts at nuisance suits (and just plain nuisances) intended to lay the groundwork for an American theocracy; "Extremist Christian Campus" is Liberty University, Jerry Falwell's outfit. The film is a non-narrative collage of stock art, music, and news clips -- sort of like the indoctrination scene in The Parallax View, except incompetent -- that strains for a concatenation effect that will ready the viewer to do battle for the Lord. Among the "bad" things in the beginning (you know they're bad because they're interspersed with images of suffering, ominous quotes, and transgender rights) is Barack Obama, suggesting in a 2006 speech that the Sermon on the Mount is a better guide to righteous living than the absurd prohibitions of Leviticus. If it seems weird to you that someone would portray this eminently reasonable and Christian POV as an example of evil, remember, first, that this is blackety-black Obama and, second, that this was exactly what conservative Christians were saying about the speech when it was uncovered for the 2008 election (e.g., "WATCH OBAMA MOCK BIBLE IN 2006" -- World Net Daily). Eight years of repudiation by the American public has not sweetened their temperaments, and the film ends by suggesting the earth with be bathed in a cleansing fire, from which true believers will be saved to listen to inspirational music forever. Don't forget, folks: This is what these people really believe.

• Happy Patriot Day. I used to note each anniversary, and track the increasing grumbliness of conservatives as they found they were losing, in the words of Dick Cheney in The Onion, "the satisfaction of telling people to do things and then them doing it -- not because they want to, but because they are afraid to do otherwise." Sure enough, at National Review, Jim Geraghty marks 9/11 XIV and worries, "Is This Date Starting to Become Too Normal a Day?"

I think I’m starting to understand how the Greatest Generation used to feel when December 7 would come and go on the calendar with barely a mention of the date’s significance. On the one hand, life has to go on. We can’t live in fear. Our foes want us paralyzed and overwhelmed by the horrific brutality of their actions. In 2011, the date fell on a Sunday, and the NFL played games.... 

By and large, those worse terrors haven’t arrived – although assorted malevolent forces like the anthrax mailer, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the Fort Hood shooter certainly tried. So have we, as a country, been spending the past f14 years waiting for another shoe to drop that never will? Or will it come some day, feeling even worse when it arrives because we let go of that late-2001 dread?

You can't see it at the website, but in the version of this appearing in Geraghty's email newsletter, he then dons the ghost sheet and warns us 9/11 heathens about all the jihadi stuff that's threatening to blow if we don't abandon our Obamaish ways, including Joshua Ryne Goldberg and "these shootings on Arizona’s highways." Seriously, can you prove these acts of vandalism aren't jihad? Maybe all those boys who used to drop rocks onto cars from overpasses were sleeper cells that are just now awakening. Ah-wooooo! Sigh. Even non-religious conservatives resemble a millenarian sect, in that they live in hope of a cataclysmic event (in their case, the resurrection of 9/11) that will restore them to power and glory.

• Jon Stewart's Moment of Zen may be over, but here's a Moment of WTF from (you probably guessed) The Federalist by Rich Cromwell, whose men-should-be-men-and-women-should-be-helpless riff climaxes thus:

For the continuation of the species, the Philips of the world have to be out there getting stupid and threatening to burn the place down. There may be a Bre next door, maybe even back living with mom and dad, but she’ll be waiting to offer a helping hand instead of encouraging him to burn the place down. Life and society may change, but every man remains a potential arsonist, every woman a potential firefighter.

You can read the whole thing if you're into context but I warn you, it won't help. I will tell you that the "arsonist" bit seems to refer to one of his Federalist bros accidentally burning Minute Rice. There's also a Chesterton quote, but I bet you knew that already. (I wish some hacker would break into all the  Catholic-cons' websites and replace the Chesterton and C.S. Lewis quotes with Erma Bombeck.)